Petrified Unrest

In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke seized the throne from Richard II. This chapter examines the crisis of legitimacy that marked the rule of Henry IV and his successors as it plays itself out in two key poems of the period: John Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. These texts aim to praise and legitimate the new Lancastrian regime and to efface the facts of Richard II’s deposition. They also make key moves in the establishment of an English literary canon, in particular through Hoccleve’s influential invention of the figure of ‘Father Chaucer’. These are texts that want to claim that succession is a matter of nature, blood, or kind; of some principle of precedence woven through the fabric of created things. At the same time, they are shot through with moments of ambivalence that suggest their uncertainty about the project of Lancastrian regime change.

Premodern Scotland

This book brings together original essays by a group of international scholars to offer ground-breaking research into the ‘Advice to Princes’ tradition and related themes of good self- and public governance in Older Scots literature, and in Latin literature composed in Scotland in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. The essays honour Professor Sally Mapstone and bring to the fore texts both from and about the royal court in a variety of genres, and for a range of audiences. The writers and texts studied include Bower’s Scotichronicon, Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, and Gavin Douglas’s Eneados. Lesser known authors and texts also receive much-needed critical attention, including Richard Holland’s The Buke of the Howlat, chronicles by Andrew of Wyntoun, Hector Boece, and John Bellenden, and poetry by sixteenth-century writers such as Robert Sempill, John Rolland of Dalkeith, and William Lauder. Non-literary texts, such as the Parliamentary ‘Aberdeen Articles’, further deepen discussion of the volume’s theme. Writings from south of the border, which provoked creative responses in Scots authors, and which were themselves inflected by the idea of Scotland and its literature, are also considered here as well as the Troy Book by John Lydgate, and Malory’s Morte Darthur. With a focus on historical and material context, contributors explore the ways in which these texts engage with notions of the self and with advisory subjects both specific to particular Stewart monarchs and of more general political applicability in Scotland in the late medieval and early modern periods.